Entries in Rosario Crocetta
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MY LOCAL VIDEO STORE has something Netflix doesn’t: a beautifully rendered bootleg DVD of The Day of the Owl (a.k.a. Il Giorno della Civetta, a.k.a. Mafia; 1968). I’ve waited years to see this filmed version of Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia’s greatest work. Considered the first accurate depiction of the Mafia in fiction, the crime novel was a hot controversy when it was published in 1961—years before the existence of the criminal organization was officially acknowledged in Italy.

Leonardo SciasciaThe film has all the trappings of a sixties international co-production: a widescreen format, slightly garish Technicolor, a dub job of varying accents and an international cast. The Hollywood name attached to the project was Lee J. Cobb, the great heavy who plays untouchable godfather Don Mariano Arena. His American-accented baritone is the only original voice you hear in this English-language version of the film. (I’d like to see and hear the Italian version as well, but then I’d lose Cobb’s essence.)

Claudia Cardinale plays the wife of a disappeared Mafia lackey. Fending for herself, she expresses fear, rage and dignity at once with a furrowing of her brow. (The sixties icon, born of Sicilian parents in Tunisia, commanded the screen five years earlier as the demure Angelica in a more famous coproduction, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, based on Tomasi di Lampedusa’s celebrated Sicilian novel).

PALERMO SOCCER STARFabrizio Miccoli apologized to his city, to his family and to the family of Giovanni Falcone for calling the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor “filth.” The word he used, captured on an intercepted phone call, was “fango”—literally "mud.” But when used as invective, it means something closer to “merda.”

Fabrizio MiccoliThe blasphemy was the tipping point for the pudgy-in-pink captain of Palermo's Serie A team, a goal-kicking striker (Italians prefer the English term “bomber”) already under investigation for alleged Mafia association and attempted extortion. “He needs a change of scenery,” said Palermo soccer president Maurizio Zamparini, who declined to renew Miccoli's contract when it expired June 30.

Miccoli’s red-card foul came after the discovery of his very close friendship with Mauro Lauricella, son of Palermo boss Antonino Lauricella, a.k.a U Scintilluni (“the Big Shiny Guy,” for his polished shoes), whose September 2011 arrest was a festive occasion. The 33-year-old Miccoli is charged with sending Lauricella Junior to shake down tardy creditors. Miccoli readily admits to his brotherly bond with Lauricella but claims ignorance of the man's Mafia links. Frank Sinatra made the same claim about his pal Lucky Luciano.

If you squint hard enough, you can see something good in Sicily’s kooky regional election this week. The shockingly high amount of voters who boycotted the race—57 percent sat out Sunday’s polls—can be read as a sign that the orgy is over for Silvio Berlusconi’s compromised cadre. More important for Sicilians, it shows that the Mafia can no longer deliver the votes to the party it favors.

Rosario CrocettaNow enter the victorious center-left governor, Rosario Crocetta, a tough-minded pol with the kind of anti-Mafia bona fides to put mobsters on notice. He hails from Gela, an industrial city on the southern coast so lousy with crime that it has its own homegrown mafia, La Stidda. (Language lesson: stella, “star” in Italian = stidda in Sicilian.)

As Gela’s seven-year mayor, Crocetta purged the city government and even the local carabiniere of stiddesi, closed eighty of their housing projects, and persuaded many shopkeepers to quit paying extortion fees. Soon elected to parliament, Crocetta served on the EU’s Anti-Mafia Commission.

Click to see the photosCrocetta also survived a 2008 plot involving a Lithuanian hitman hired to assassinate “that communist faggot,” according to a boss caught on tape. That he is gay excites the mainstream press which has tried to come to terms with this inversion of Italian machismo. Then again, Crocetta is no powder puff. (Compare Berlusconi’s makeup and painted-on hair. And no jokes about Palermo’s soccer colors.)

Second place in the governor’s race went to Beppo Grillo, the comic-provocateur who taunts Berlusconi publicly, calling him “the Psycho Dwarf.” (The former prime minister, tarnished by sex scandals and plagued with a big mouth, was slapped with a tax fraud conviction last week.)

Grillo’s protest vote further reveals strong disaffection in Sicily, a red state-like conservative bastion. If anything, he split the left vote and still managed to trounce the Dwarf’s candidate, Sebastiano Musumeci, who came in third.